Department of Educational Psychology, Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary, Budapest, Hungary

The ambition of humans to elevate themselves beyond their natural means and to acquire transcendental insight and power is as ancient as our cultural history. The goal of this course is to highlight some aspects of this ambition that are related to Western Esotericism, thus to provide a solid picture of some key phenomena of mysticism, magic, and occult trends in intellectual history. Special attention will be paid to the historical period of late Antiquity to the early modern, as well as the post-Romanticism era. The topics of esotericism discussed in the course relate to cultural history, art history, film studies, and religious studies tracing the Judeo-Christian heritage. The learning outcome should be the acquisition of methodological tools in order to approach and assess the highlighted phenomena in a reliable scholarly way: close reading of texts; interpretation of images and films; placing cultural representations in social and historical contexts.